Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Wow! I couldn't believe the size of my email inbox when I got home last night. All such wonderful comments, and a terrific discussion. I am trying to answer everyone, but whammo! Work is busy. Just finishing up the school year for CART, and already have depositions overlapping, as well as outside-UVM CART clients keeping me busy, and a few other things I'm trying to manage. So in the meantime, allow me to present to you my i for the ABC-Along.

I hate ironing and will do it only as a last resort. And yet somehow there is a collection of old irons in my house. Hint: Except in the legal marital estate sense, they're not "mine." Anyway, here is a sampling.

Were these people nuts? Coal-filled, kerosene-fired, heat-on-the-woodstove, dangerous heavy items of laborious drudgery. Why were more husbands not murdered via these lovely blunt instruments? Oh, I guess because without a husband to bring home the bacon, the women would be doomed to taking in people's IRONING to make a living. I'd sooner commit suicide by turning the kerosene-fired implement on myself. Are wrinkles really THAT bad? Humans are really weird creatures.

I'll admit this, though: They make fairly decent bookends flanking an antique set of horticulture encyclopedias, and they made a good excuse for buying an antique rustic jelly cupboard at an estate sale a few years ago in which to display them.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Some of us old-school bloggers have been starting to feel like we're becoming a little bit antiquated or left behind due to the Ravelry influence. I hope it will be simply a detour -- a passing phenomenon 'til the novelty wears off -- but it may be a permanent thing. Blogs may go the way of the polar bears, some of us stranded on mini-ice floes, with no food supply, 'til we die off. It would not be entirely unexpected. People are always off to the Next Big Thing, and I am proud of and applaud Jess and Casey for turning Ravelry into a thriving concern for themselves. That sort of success is far too rare in this world. They had a great idea, took the risk, ran with it, and they're being rewarded for their brilliance and hard work. Bravo!

But it is alluring to the masses to get in there (Ravelry) for whatever reason, and by all accounts it's like a black hole. You get sucked into the vortex and may never come out. Ergo, there is no time or interest left for reading blogs.

Personally, I have no real interest in seeking out yet more patterns and yarns and seeing what other people have done with the patterns and yarns (the number one reason that people give me that they love Ravelry). I know about myself that I am the proverbial kid in a candy store. Finding too many choices is overwhelming and just makes me unable to move on anything. I have a hard enough time, it appears, to finish the three or four sweaters, and two or three pairs of socks I already have in the works.

It can be a fun activity in itself to add more items to the queue, or buy more yarn, but that sort of activity has lost its appeal for me at this stage of my life. I've been there, done that, in my past. Does the word "eBay" mean anything to you? I'm in the K.I.S.S. and nonacquisitive-of-stuff phase of my life. (Tell that to the new clocks, right? But those weren't really "mine.")

I don't have time, or the interest, to take up one more thing, and as I've mentioned once or twice before, I certainly do not have any interest in forums. That to me seems like a step back to the early '90s days of the internet, not a progression forward. Maybe I'm missing something.

Over time various bloggers have discussed the question of whether a person is a KNITTER or a knitter, usually in a rather superior tone, some of them saying, "I'm a Knitter with a capital K. The others are just people who knit."

Well, I'm a knitter with a small k, just a person who knits when I feel like it. I'll borrow the slogan from the pride parades: I'm here, I'm a knitter, get used to it. I'm a casual knitter who likes to knit on occasion. It is not the be-all and end-all of my existence, and it is not what defines me. I am the polar opposite of the people who claim that if they don't have knitting in their hands, they feel like a part of them is missing and they don't know what to do with their hands. I am not an avid, or maybe better phrased, rabid knitter, and I know exactly what to do with my hands if I'm not knitting. I will never be a great knitter. I knit for relaxation when I'm not doing something else that I like equally well for relaxation.

I love my blog more than my knitting. I enjoy the act of blogging, treasure the friendships I have attained through it, the fact that it forces me to be more observant in order to find something to write about, and I love the interactions it creates. It's my therapy. Maybe I'm a Blogger, not a blogger. I don't know. And perhaps if all the former knitblog readers are just Raveling and not blogging or reading blogs, this is the time for me to metamorphose into something else. But I'm not planning to change anything until I'm writing into the ether with no one reading, and maybe even not then. I'm not complaining or whining -- I'm leading up to something, I promise. I have a good amount of traffic here, and a lot of lovely loyal readers. A skein of sock yarn, no matter how special, though I might like it fairly well, will not send me into shivers of indescribable pleasure as I've seen some claim it does for them. I suppose this revelation will probably make a few people unsubscribe from the blog, because that must mean I'm not a Knitter.

We pause this unintended diatribe to bring you news of some of my yarn having been knit -- not by me, of course, but by Mary B., who bought some of my alpaca yarn in a stash sale a couple of years ago. She knit it up in this pattern, though the gauge is not the same and she had to do some adjustments, but how awesome is this? Mary shares with me that she discovered how hard it is to do the self-portrait-in-the-mirror trick. And how well I know this.

Anywayyyyy, the other day, Erica wrote me to share that a simple free pattern she had written had been picked up by Knitting Pattern Central, and that she had noticed a sizable increase in traffic due to that. She said she'd checked to see if any of my humble patterns were listed there, and could not find them. I believe her words were, "Dude, write the woman." Well, I did. And Knitting Pattern Central has now linked my super-simple double-thick Dulaan kid's hat, and my Dulaan cupcake hat. She rejected the Magic 28 sock for the moment, because there is no photo of it in the pattern, which I intend to remedy and then resubmit it. I have not yet linked her to the lining-a-hat-with-microfleece or the Sophie-bag-with-beaded-handles tutorials. Both of those things get a lot of hits on their own through my blog, but I expect they will get even more if directed through the KPC site.

Well, the first day I was listed in her site under "new patterns" was Saturday, and my blog traffic for a Saturday was increased by approximately a third. That's huge! I'm sharing this with you so that those of you who have free patterns that are not listed and who want to increase your blog traffic, you might want to check that out. I have no way of knowing whether this will be a permanent flow of traffic, whether it's "good" traffic, or if it's just an initial spike, but I feel it was a worthwhile exercise anyway.

Excuse me, I've just thought of something good to go do with my hands. See you tomorrow.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Time for seedlings to thrive. This is the first time I've tried Gardeners Supply's Deep Root Seed-Starting System, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. The seedlings are far ahead of the ones I started at the same time in the smaller APS seedstarting system I had heretofore sworn by for probably 15 years. Sadly, I see that the Deep Root system is sold out. Hopefully they'll get more next year.

Time for the blue grape hyacinths.

And the ruffly daffodils.

It's time to do a Tabata workout with my Gymboss timer. The Gymboss has a setting that makes it super-easy to program eight intervals with 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. It works GREAT, plus it's lightweight and has a strong clip to attach it to your clothes. It came WITH battery included, and the shipping was fast and inexpensive.

And it's also time to buy new (old) clocks.

Of course you know which one is my favorite.

I don't know what is up with the thumbnails on Typepad. Is everyone having this problem? They seem cloudy to me. When you click on them to make them full-size, they are clearer. [Edited to add: I guess the thumbnails are only cloudy on the preview. They published clearly. Phew.]

Sunday, April 27, 2008

1. Ben Stein KICKED MY
STENO-WRITIN' ASS. He talks incredibly fast, and he had a cold or a frog in his throat that day. If anyone is going to do CART or captioning for him in the future,
I suggest you go in the green room and slip some qualudes into his tea
(he likes tea with honey, we all learned on Friday). And if I fancy myself eclectic, well, I can't hold a candle to him. The subjects he touched upon were as disparate as you can imagine. I had indeed prepped for many of them, but of course not all. He was seriously funny, though, and managed to artfully skirt the issue of The Documentary quite well. Not that I think he should be allowed to skirt the issue, but in that setting, on that beautiful day, who needs the angst? I sure didn't. I have my own opinions as to why he did that movie, and they're not very complimentary, though I have not seen the thing and don't intend to. He did get a couple of pointed questions from audience members, unamplified, so for one of them I could not hear the question at ALL, and all I could put in the captions was his answer, without the context of the question. Not the optimum situation.

2. After the event, the deaf people told me I did a wonderful job (though ironically they
couldn't hear what I missed, gah!); the American Sign Language interpreter was almost dead, and we commiserated -- interesting, she said she made a lot of mistakes, too -- I never thought about a sign language interpreter making mistakes, but I suppose they do, too; some people from the press
said they have a new appreciation for
my job; and the A/V/media people offered to get a fire extinguisher to put out my smoking hands after it was over. After the house was empty and I was bent over, packing up my stuff, one of the guys who had been monitoring sound and video in the overflow facility said loudly over the microphone, "Norma, HOW ARE YOUR HANDS doing?" and we all had a good laugh. They gave me a rose. I needed it -- and alcohol and a nice meal and a few other things, including an early bedtime -- to counteract the adrenaline-overdose headache caused by The Ben Stein Experience. I believe this is an appropriate time for one of my favorite phrases: Fucking Hell.

3. Thankfully, there was no sign of Mr. Obnoxious of the Voice Recognition Obnoxiouses anywhere. If he'd had the audacity to come up to me with his bullcrap, I would have found the energy somehow to kick him where it hurts. I was still running on adrenaline-hyperdrive at that point, so he never would have known what hit him. The
new captioning software worked like a charm, and my new seating location was very much like being up on a pedestal, which, of course, is exactly AS IT SHOULD BE. Haha. Anyway, if Stein hadn't talked as fast as a speeding bullet, I would have done a great job (and I suppose if pigs could fly....) It was, as I predicted, a humbling experience, though unexpectedly it was the speed, and not the erudition, that made it so. There were times when I had to just stop and let my brain untie itself from knots to prevent it from exploding, so entire sentences were missed. Ah, well. Life will have to go on.

4. All my photos seem blurry to me lately, and maybe they are or
maybe I'm just overtired. When you click on them to make them larger,
they seem to be clearer -- at least to me. If they're blurry to you,
too, I apologize. I can screw up photos with the nicest of cameras. It really is not the camera, but the woman behind the camera.

5. Cripes, hummers are here already? I haven't seen one, but I was sent out the alert by Judy, (she asked whether that pin on the map that appears to be in my vicinity was mine, but no, it's not) so I've put out my feeders. This is very early. Usually they arrive at my house Mother's Day weekend.

6. We had dandelion greens and asparagus from our garden for lunch yesterday. I put them into omelets with ricotta cheese. Mmmmm, spring.

7. The onion sets are growing like crazy, the beets have germinated and are humming right along, as have the lettuce seeds and radishes and some of the spinach and Swiss chard. This is all extremely early. I hope everything does not get nipped in the bud.

8. It was very much a negative cash flow weekend (already, and it's not even over yet). It is Maple Festival weekend here -- it's all about the maple, my friends. I avoid the big ugly elementary school pancake breakfasts in favor of making my own whole-grain pancakes. Well, I should say usually I do. Now I don't even go that far, since I mostly try to avoid grains altogether (except when I'm eating brownies, cookies, and cake, I mean). But as part of the Maple Festival, we went to an antiques show and unexpectedly dropped a lot of cash. I wanted to buy an awesome Victorian syrup pitcher, since it just seemed the Right Thing To Do, it being maple syrup celebration time and all, but instead we bought clocks. Two of them. Figure the price of 10 tanks of gas for a Camry in today's (Vermont) prices. Then we went to a furniture store and dropped lots more cash. 30 tanks. Then (TMK, avert your eyes) I ate fried foods and apple pie with ice cream for dinner. And still I've had no maple syrup or maple cotton candy or maple fudge or maple walnut pie or maple ice cream or maple cream pie or maple-glazed chicken or maple-drizzled fried dough or maple daiquiris (I think that's what I saw them selling at one booth) or maple pralines or sugar on snow. That's not riiiiiight.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

The other day when I was arriving home, I noticed that a neighbor down the street had raked leaves and she had piled scads of plastic bags full on her driveway. I wanted to stop at that moment and ask her if I could have her leaves. I just could not see those giant plastic bags going to a landfill somewhere, if that was her intent. But I was too shy. Now, I know what you're thinking. You? Shy? I know.

I'm not shy, as you probably have gleaned, but for some reason it took me a couple days to get up the nerve to call her and ask her if I could have her leaves. A person who rakes her leaves and puts them in plastic bags might not understand a person like me, who wants to take those same leaves and feed them to her dirt. I might come off a bit like a wacko. But I sort of know this person. She taught me Creative Writing in high school 30+ years ago, and I was pretty sure she wouldn't think I was TOO much of a freak. So I finally made the call. I asked her if she was going to pay to have those hauled away, and she said yes, that depending on the man on duty, it would either be $5 or $2 a bag. If she got the nice guy it would only be $2 a bag. And she had 35 bags. Can you imagine?

She was happy to catch up with me once I told her who I was, and she said she had always admired my house, but she had no idea it was I who was in this house. "Your house has character," she says. "I can't say the same for the rest of them up there." Well, yes. It does take character, I guess, to launch a rescue mission for bags of leaves.

She said that a lawyer in town had stopped by the day before and essentially asked her the same question, but he had not showed up to get them, so I was welcome to them. "I had no idea I had such a gold mine!"

She asked me if I know this guy. Of course I do, and he's a real character. I told her, "If Peter shows up, tell him Norma took them. We're buddies." So she giggled and said she would. She told me that her garbage man would arrive tomorrow morning at 8, so I said, "Well, it has to be done tonight, because tomorrow I have a very busy day at UVM." And so it was done.

This was the scene from my veg garden when I was laying down and wetting down cardboard and emptying the bags of leaves onto it, spraying them with water so they'd hopefully stay put 'til I can get a little layer of compost over them or something to hold them from blowing away when they dry out. That's my rooftop on the left and my neighbor's on the right. In the distance is Lake Champlain and beyond that is a bit of the Adirondacks. I've got a pretty good view from my garden, hm? What that means is my back yard is VERY STEEP. And amazingly, I had the foresight, when we were building, to ask my excavator to make a flat spot up there. I thought at the time it was going to be for a gazebo or something -- a place to sit and admire the view. Instead, it's my garden spot, and I couldn't be happier about that turn of events. But as you can see, when I was doing this work, it was almost dark. And that means mosquitoes. So that means I was working pretty fast to get it done.

I emptied all the leaves and spritzed them liberally with water. The robins were gathering and twittering happily. (Leaves mean worms and worms mean happy robins. They knew this. They did.) Doesn't the new carpet of leaves look nice?

Awesome.

As I was emptying the very last bag, my eye caught some movement.

Operation Rescue Leaves has been renamed.He was in the last bag.Could it be the prince I've been looking for?--------------------------Tomorrow: Ben Stein kicked my ass.

Friday, April 25, 2008

2. Best quote from a CART event ever: "I couldn't hear what she had to say about hearing aids, so I'm not sure if I need hearing aids or not." The person was dead serious (and visually challenged, so could not read the CART screen very well).

3. It's been a long week of long days. Today will be no exception. Someone is coming to speak, and it will be the debut of my new authentic captioning software. Up to now, we've just been projecting my computer screen to a larger screen via a projector. Now it will look like real television captions, with the speaker's video above the words. Pretty neat. Now more than ever, the unindoctrinated will probably believe the captions are being done by voice recognition software. This speaker will undoubtedly be so erudite (and need I mention controversial?) I will make a million mistakes, so I guess I should just let them go ahead and eat cake think it's VR after all. It'll no doubt be a humbling experience. One good thing about captions versus the large CART screen -- it only shows two to three lines of text on the screen at a time, rather than 25 lines lingering. The mistakes will be pushed off the screen faster, at least.

4. Bueller? Yes, I've put that in my dictionary. I've been prepping every chance I get for weeks. It's anybody's guess what he might talk about. Anything from intelligent design to Michael Moore to economics to the law to acting to the U.S. troops to whatever. I've been looking up stuff online, listening to interviews (a favorite -- haha -- is the one he did recently with Pat Robertson. Check it out on YouTube if you wish), I skimmed his last book, etc.

5. I don't get paid, per se, for prep, though my fee for an event of this sort is high enough that a certain amount of prep time is, in essence, compensated. Most reporters would probably not do this level of preparation, but if I can save myself from having a panic attack by over-prepping, that's my preferred M.O., and I like to think that's what separates the men (me) from the boys. When I was at the BBC, there was a staff of Oxbridge-educated people doing the research for me, giving me education about the topic and the speaker, and feeding me the words. Those were the Cinderella-at-the-ball-before-the-clock-struck-midnight days. Now I do it all myself, and I have a hard time making people understand how much work it is, and a hard time making people understand why most other reporters don't want to do this work. At the moment, I have three pages on a yellow legal pad, two columns each, of words and names that I want to be sure are in my steno dictionary. Everything from apes and orangutans (which he loves to use in his interviews about Darwinism) to Ben Bernanke to General Petraeus to niggardly to Darwinian(s), to Mike Huckabee to Bork and Bjork to theist(s) to aborigines to Nazism to Third Reich to Guillermo Gonzalez to hecklers to abiogenesis to... you get the idea.

6. Clearly I will not have thought of everything, and that's even assuming I remember how to stroke the word in whatever way I have entered it into my dictionary. The way my brain works, I initially stroke it in according to my logic as to "what would make sense" without any thought or hesitation, and that's usually -- keyword usually -- how I would stroke it in the heat of the moment. Then arise the unanticipated conflicts or word boundary problems. Every single time one of those arises in my work, I say, "I've got to remember that one so I can blog about it or give it as an example," but then when I go to write about it or talk about it, I can't remember a single one. Sorry. You'll just have to take my word for it. (But of course, voice recognition software doesn't have word boundary problems. False.)

7. With my increasing specialization in CART work, I felt I needed to get some new business cards, separate from the cards I use for deposition or court work. I didn't want to put all that I do on one card, because the two fields really don't overlap and I think it would be confusing. Also, the cards for the legal work are rather understated and elegant. I allowed myself to get a bit more colorful and playful for the CART cards. See?

That's me: Norma, a la CART. (Shoot. I should copyright and trademark that and use it for my business name someday. Don't you dare steal it!)

Notice there is not one word on there about me running voice recognition software. All right, that's the last time I'm even going to mention voice recognition software. I promise, I'll give it up. If I don't shut up about voice recognition software, one, I'll lose friends, and two, I'll end up the number one hit on Google when one Googles voice recognition software. Mwahaha.

8. I've just been notified that I've now got a summer school student, a grad student who majors in English. As I was saying goodbye to the biology grad students and faculty yesterday, I thanked them for putting up with me all year and told them that I will now be working "in English," and we all had a good laugh that I probably won't remember how to write "regular words" anymore. So after the graduate-level summer school English course, there will follow in the fall the following: organic chemistry, a nutrition course, another graduate-level English course, and a couple of as-yet-unknown courses. And still no voice recognition. Oops.

9. And just before I went to bed last night (about midnight), I quickly checked my stats. One of the last searches to land on my blog was "how to stop repeating words in head in court reporting." Yes, that is a hazard of this occupation. You talk, we are repeating it in our heads. Even more specifically, we are repeating the words while at the same time mentally forming the finger positions of the steno strokes (or outlines, as we call them). Freaky, huh? I've stopped doing that most of the time now, but it took YEARS (decades, probably) for the words to stop. That is one reason it is hard for me to watch TV, I think, and to listen to things like music when I get home from work -- or it used to be that way, especially when I worked all day every day in court. Now that I work less, it is less. No need to send the men in the white coats.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

I'm hoping this is going to be a big fruit year at my house. I've patiently picked the blossoms off our blueberry bushes for two full years so the plants would get stronger. This is the Year of the Blueberry Harvest, and I can't WAIT. All six bushes (six different varieties) are alive and well. The photos in the extreme upper left and extreme lower right are of two of them as they stand now: Promising green buds.

Last year I enjoyed the pear-ginger jam-making so much that I wanted to start growing pears. I planted a Summercrisp and a Seckel. I prefer to plant trees in the fall, but I have found that if I wait 'til the fall to try to find fruit trees at my local nurseries, they are all gone. So annoying. So the Summercrisp and the Seckel are what I came home with. After I got home and did some reading, I felt that my choices were not so good. The Summercrisp appears to be a great eating pear -- if it's picked early, still green, and the entire harvest eaten all at once. (practical, that) They don't keep well, and they apparently aren't so great for cooking or preserving. And the Seckels...I had no idea how teeny-tiny a Seckel pear is when I bought it. I then sent away for a pear that I thought would be more to my liking -- a Collette. However, we never got it into the ground, so now it's on the back deck in a bucket of water, dead.

A few years ago, we lost our two lovely plum trees. They were prune plums, and they took a long time to bear fruit. Then, as I guess is normal for prune plums, they only bore every other year. But they had reached maturity and they were lovely when they did fruit. Well, as luck would have it, one year when it was a fruit-bearing year was an especially rainy year in our part of Vermont. The rain made the tree so heavy with luscious fruit and the ground was so soggy that one morning we awoke to find both trees uprooted and fallen into the driveway. I shed tears. A neighbor a few blocks away suffered the same fate.

So last year I bought two new plum trees. One is doing fine; the other did not make it through the winter. It was on its last legs when I bought it, and I hoped my green thumb would carry the day, but it was not to be. So now I have to see if I can find the receipt (doubtful), because it came with a one-year warranty. More than likely I will just be shelling out the cash for a new one, because my other plum needs a pollinator, and if I find that receipt it will be a plum miracle.

And I've got asparagus up already! I gave it a nice feeding of compost yesterday, and then we had a thunderstorm with a bit of rain last night. We might be eating asparagus -- or aspergrass, as an old friend likes to call it -- this weekend!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Be thankful that I don't have smell-a-vision on the blog. If I did, you'd definitely be unsubscribing right now. Well, not right NOW. I've showered, thank the Lord. But a while ago, when I was writing this, which was Sunday afternoon, to be exact. I do strive to be mostly honest and accurate here. I tend to prewrite entries, especially when I expect my week to be as full as this one is. It sometimes feels like I'm in a bit of a time warp when I do that, but I can't help myself. Rereading this tonight (Tuesday) just before it posts for Wednesday, I can't believe this was only written Sunday. It feels like a MONTH ago Sunday. My life has been heavily laden with work and other stuff.

Sunday was a marathon day in the yard and garden. I spent most of it in the vegetable garden, and man, is that shaping up nicely, and so much earlier in the season than usual. Now I'm all ready for the inevitable two or three more snowstorms and several hard frosts that we will get before gardening is really seriously underway in Vermont -- Memorial Day Weekend.

I love my black grow beds. They make my life so much easier. And the lasagna soil layering is paying off in spades, as well. The soil is so healthy and happy, I almost want to eat it.

See how nice the grow beds look, with a bark mulch walkway around them? Sweet.

Sunday started out with me doing my favorite thing to do in the garden. This is going to sound bizarre, but my true favorite thing to do is to empty the compost bins, using the decomposed stuff in my garden as soil amendment, and then relayering the partially decomposed stuff with new material to be composted. It's hard, heavy, farm-girl, sweat-producing work, and I just love it. I love seeing the biological activity of the earthworms and other detritus-consumers at work -- or more accurately, the results of it. This year, due to my regular exercise and weight-lifting regimen throughout the winter, I was able to manhandle those bins more efficiently, with less exhaustion and pain afterward, too. Bonus.

Maybe one reason I love my black grow beds so much is because they are in essence eight more compost bins. Using the layering technique is nothing more than sheet (cold) composting. I love the garden lasagna (it's like cooking in the garden) and love layering the fully and partially composted stuff in the bins and the beds. Who knew I had such a fetish for compost bins? It's mud pies for grownups, and you may recall, I've always had a thing for mud pies.

TMK (who now has a blog -- check it out) got a kick out of me referring to Tabata shoveling in jest one day last week, but all day Sunday I was truly thinking about Tabata shoveling, Tabata digging, Tabata raking, Tabata moving rocks, Tabata breaking stems for the composter, Tabata lifting. I didn't really pull out the Tabata timer I have, but it was a kick to think about it.

Anywayyyyy, after I got done playing with the compost, I got a section ready for a second double row of peas, to be planted in one week, so as to hopefully stagger the harvests a bit, and I dug up and transplanted my strawberry plants into one of the black raised beds.

I mounded leaves and old hay in the place where the strawberry plants used to be, and covered them with a bag of organic potting soil, just because I had one on hand that needed to be emptied. Due to the green things that were already growing in it, I knew it would not be a good choice for indoor plants. I plan to get some composted manure to add to the hill, and it'll be home to a zucchini or summer squash trio of plants this summer.

Continuing on with the smell theme of today, it rained onions again on Sunday. Someone gave my mother too many onions, but she felt she could not say no. So she called me to offload some, and I felt I could not say no. So a caramelized onion-and-mushroom crustless quiche became the end-of-gardening-marathon dinner. I more or less used this recipe. (I added an extra egg and mushrooms, used half-and-half instead of heavy cream, and left out the crust.) I guess it wasn't much like the original recipe at all, except in the sense of "just your basic quiche formula." But it was yummy with sauteed broccoli on the side.

And: You remember that deer poop I photographed? GONE. Not one drop
(or plop) left. Would it really have decomposed already? I don't
think so. Does anyone know of an animal that eats deer poop, every
last morsel? Or have I completely lost my mind?

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Well, now. This is so interesting. I'm sort of a man-hater from way back (but some of my best friends are men! Really!), and I'm a '70s girl, with whatever that brings along with it about the conflict between the sexes, though I do not consider myself a raging feminist. (Just a raging something else, I suppose. You decide.)

But even in the heat of my rage when writing that rant the other day, I did not think of this angle that was brought to my attention by a reader via email. She wrote (quoted with her permission):

I don't think it's ignorance. Or if it is, it's tinged (colored, dyed
through and through, actually) with misogyny. If he'd come up to a man
doing your work, they would have had a good ol' time discussing the
machine and the technology and the wondrous ability of the male typist.
(Yes, women also are guilty of misogyny, too, due to ignorance or about
a million other things. And that's a whole other topic, too, though a
rather dull one.)

I type around 95 wpm and am constantly advised -- by men-- that
they will "soon" have voice recognition machines that will type faster.
I've been waiting for 40+ years now. I haven't figured out a good put
down in all that time. I'll keep reading your blog to see if anyone
comes up with one.

So if it's a
"girl" doing it, it's got to be not worth anything, must be super-easy,
and should be replaced by some machine. Even though most men have a rather steep uphill battle with me, the thought that a guy is probably a misogynist pig is not something that pops
into my head when I talk to a man, especially a man who is somewhat my
contemporary, and an (I assume) educated man who has come to an event such as this one.

But a) I think she could be right, and/but b) it's an interesting
(super-interesting, I think) phenomenon: In my classroom work, guess which
demographic is the unabashedly MOST IMPRESSED: Young men. They go, "WOW!"
within about three seconds. They have a million questions, they sit and watch it all
through the class, they flirt and flit, and [not me at all, but] my young female students benefit from all the
male attention, assuming they're looking for it, which, let's face it, they are.

Monday, April 21, 2008

So there was this CART gig I had on Saturday night. I hadn't been provided with any prep materials ahead of time, but I am resourceful, oh yes I am, and despite the fact that I can be pretty hard on myself, I know I did a bang-up job. It was an over-two-hour event, filled with Native American and equine and accessibility and coping-with-disabilities terminology. I just went through the transcript before writing this, and it was 40 pp. Normally a two-hour event would produce more pages, but some of the time I was just sitting there, because they showed a documentary that was pre-captioned.

I had 9 translation errors. One time I misstroked "reservation," so it came out "Rhett's vation." Another time they said "Beyonce," as in the singer, (who'dathunkit?) and although I had previously entered it into my dictionary in two different ways, at that moment it caught me off guard and I stroked it a different way, so it came out readable phonetically, but wonky. There were a few double words. That's always an annoyance (to me, anyway), and it comes from going too fast. The machine registers two strokes of something instead of one. The machine is like a musical instrument, it sometimes goes out of "tune," and such "bounces" happen. I can't remember the others. Those were the notable ones. Thank goodness I got a copy of one woman's introductory speech four minutes before the event, as I was able to put in Cowasuck Nation, which, if I hadn't had that ability, might have translated, "could you suck nation." Wow, would that have seemed Freudian or what?

The punctuation is never even close to perfect because people don't talk with punctuation and I'm just doin' the best I can in real time, people. The microphones kept malfunctioning. A recurring joke of the evening was, "Can you hear me now?" delivered in the Verizon commercial way. I was thankful they had evicted the bat (presumably without harm) that showed up just before the event began, and they did it without knocking down or trashing my computer and steno machine.

I was still able to hear most things and write them down, so the entire audience -- hearing and hearing impaired -- could read it, with about a one-second delay from spoken word to reading it. (I'm patting myself on the back so much right now that if I didn't do yoga fairly regularly, I'd probably throw my shoulder out.)

Then as we were packing up and congratulating each other on a great event, a man and a woman come up to me. The man says, "Excuse me. Were you typing as WELL as running voice recognition software?"

"I beg your pardon?" I say, blasphemy dripping from my voice. "Heavens, no. I do not use voice recognition software."

He feels compelled to inform me that IT IS OUT THERE, this wonderful voice recognition software. Why do certain guys seem to get all warm fuzzies about machines doing jobs instead of people? Wankers. I tell him that no, actually, it's not. Voice recognition software works marginally well for single users, but it takes time to train it; that it is not even close to being capable of writing multiple voices at high speeds in a setting like this, and can't handle accents, especially not in real time. Why I felt the need to dignify his rudeness (because he was rude, not simply asking the question out of curiosity) by responding is a subject I should take up with my therapist. Wait. I don't have a therapist. You'll have to be my therapist, then, OK?

Oh, he needs to tell me in a very authoritative way that it is definitely capable, and it's 90% accurate. He did add "it's only 90%," clearly acknowledging at that point that my translation was better than that, but implying that it will be no time before the wonderful A.I. will speed right past me. 90%, although it sounds high, is not even close to accurate. Mine was dang close to 100. Our certification tests have to be passed at greater than 95% accuracy, punctuation included, and all court reporters agree that, in spite of the testing, if we were only 95% accurate in our work on a daily basis, we'd be lousy reporters and even lousier captioners. The tests are five minutes long, three of them at a sitting, given at very high speeds, and therefore the error allowances are greater, the idea being that if we test at the very high speeds at greater than 95% under a testing situation, that means we will then have a reserve of speed to enable us to have endurance through long days out in the real world.

I'm just realizing as I'm writing this that I think he started this conversation because he wanted to know the brand of the wonderful voice recognition software that I was using that was so dat-burned fast and accurate. The brand is "NORMA," asshole!

He tells me that A.I. (artificial intelligence) is so great, and it's definitely out there, but "we can't afford it," and he made a gesture to encompass other people in the room. Hello? (who's the "we" he's referring to, I wonder?) He said the database could definitely be done with A.I., to cover all those many accents, but it would have to be huge. Yeah, I'd say so, like his arrogance and his ignorance and his rudeness to me. Should I list to him the accents and subject matters I've done in the last year, ya think?

I was probably just a little bit rude to him before it was over. I wanted him out.of.my.SPACE. But to my credit, I did not strike him, spit on him, or call him names. And this was after he then said, "So what are you, JUST A COURT REPORTER?"

If I'd had my wits about me, I would have said, "Yes, I'm just a court reporter. And you are just aaaaaaaaaayyy... (doctor, lawyer, engineer, software designer...fill in the blank)?

Still steaming, but having mostly composed myself, I then went out into the area where there was an after-event reception. A woman (an older lady with a
Dutch boy haircut) said, as I was parking my suitcase holding all my equipment, "So you were the one running the voice recognition software?" My GOD. They're EVERYWHERE. So I said no, I
was .... she interrupted me, "You were typing that whole
time?" I say well, not typing exactly, but writing steno. "Oh, so you just write steno and it gets translated for you?" (as if it's just all.so.easy.) She says, "I'm a typist, so ...." I guess my withering stare shut her up, because she trailed off then.

GIVE ME A FRICKIN' BREAK. I think they might need to isolate me from the public before I hurt someone. Or perhaps these were plants that somebody put in there to provoke me and see how I would react? Was this Candid Camera? Well, it was definitely a "character-building evening," I'll tell you. This is the first time, except for the inevitable question that crops up in depositions (also from men, mostly IBMers), "Why don't they just tape it?!" that I've had people be so strange about it. Usually they at least say, "Wow. That's amazing. How do you DO that?" before they start educating me in obnoxious tones of voice that I can and WILL be replaced with a machine -- it's only a matter of time. And we'll all be a better society for it, too! Have I mentioned lately: I HATE PEOPLE?

I guess that's what I get for working, and not eating matzo, on the first night of Passover. I bet you the people in the seder down the hall would have thought I was hot shit and would have praised me left, right, and center, if I'd gone and done their seder in realtime. Cripes. Another lost opportunity. I guess I was handed my bitter herbs in another way, hrm?

Pardon me, though, I don't have time to rant for much longer. I have to go and demonstrate my apparently useless, archaic skill to a prospective student of Exercise & Movement Science and Athletic Training at 8:00 this morning, for the whole morning. Following that, I will demonstrate to a prospective engineering student. I don't know why they don't just use that brilliant voice recognition software instead, but there you go. Apparently I work for a very backwards institution. NOT.